Word: comically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...contains elements which are far superior to competence or success. Indeed, the hope for great films in Hollywood seems just now to be shared about evenly by Val Lewton and by Preston Sturges, with the odds, perhaps, on Lewton. Lewton wholly lacks the Sturges brilliance, adroitness and comic gift; he probably hasn't it in him to make a wow. But his feeling for cinema is quite as deep and spontaneous as that of Sturges, and his feeling for human beings, and how to bring them to life on the screen, is deeper...
Funnies. In Andover, Mass., three boys, aged 8 to 10, piled rocks on a railroad track, derailed a Boston & Maine handcar, explained they were imitating a favorite comic book villain...
...most quietly fey and edgy comic strips in the U.S. this week made its second appearance in book form. Barnaby and Mr. O'Malley (Holt; $2) is a 328-page collection of the bland fantasies of 38-year-old Crockett Johnson. Johnson's unorthodox strip first appeared two years ago in New York City's tabloid PM, now draws a host of addicts in 31 U.S. newspapers, including the Baltimore Evening Sun, Philadelphia Record, Chicago Sun, St. Louis Star-Times...
...Cooper, luckily, is well qualified to keep such comic material within range of masculine bearability. Miss Wright, unluckily, has little on which to employ her charm and talent. Frank Morgan and Patricia Collinge, in supporting roles, display a veteran's generosity with laughs, and Nunnally Johnson's script establishes him more solidly than ever as one of Hollywood's surest humorists. (Typical Johnson scene: a gruesome wedding rehearsal in a small-town church...
Reported Dead. Maurice Chevalier, 54, straw-hatted, camel-lipped vaudevillian; executed by French Maquis. Son of a starving housepainter in Paris's Menilmontant slum, Chevalier first took the stage at II as a midget comic, played baggy-pants burlesque routines while he grew taller. In his teens, he replaced the dancing partner of Paris's famed Mistinguette, in World War I landed in a German prison camp, escaped as a Red Cross worker. After the war he grinned and pouted his way from French casinos to frothy U.S. cinema successes (Love Parade, The Smiling Lieutenant), thriftily saved...